It’s not uncommon to hear about someone that “lost all their pictures”. Perhaps it was all in their phone that took a tour of a storm drain. Or they were all on a laptop where the hard drive failed, as all eventually must. Or a ransom hacking attack rendered all their files unreadable. Wherever your photo archive is stored, the photos there will eventually be lost. You can count on it.
Offsite Backup
As you’re moving all your pictures to one place on one computer, buy a subscription to an offsite backup service for that computer. Check every week or two to make sure it is working, and periodically test that you can get a file back from the service. A common failure is to pay for a backup service that is not set up correctly, or that fails, so that you don’t actually have the backup protection you think you have.
We’ve used Carbonite for some years, and it has been economical and without drama. We used IDrive for some years also, and as a result of significant drama, we no longer use it. There are a number of options, and most will work fine.
Pay for your Backup Service
Don’t use a free cloud service (e.g., OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.) as your backup service. If you do, realize that since you’re not paying for the service directly, you’re paying for the service in some way you may not understand. These services typically obscure the connection between your master archive on your local computer and backup files on the service, in addition to confusing the cloud storage with files from other devices you may enroll in the service. One master archive clearly associated with multiple, independent backups is hard to achieve with the free services.
Local Backups
Next, you need a scheme for local backups, too. One backup service is not enough, no matter how reassuring is their marketing material. Periodically, copy your entire photo archive to some type of storage device, then store that device someplace secure, disconnected from any computer. We use a 1 terabyte USB disk drive for our backups, and the utility FreeFileSync to periodically copy from our master archive to the backup drive. As the drive fills, we delete one of the prior backups to make room. Don’t always delete the oldest copy, though – every now and then skip to the next oldest copy so your backup media has a selection of backups: latest, really old and fairly recent.